Category Archives: Planning

Digital technology and social media have dramatically speeded up the pace of brand-customer relationships.

They also speed up the pace of brand crises.

But has market research insight delivery kept pace?

Clients and agencies have learnt that you need new research tools, and in this webinar we’ll be talking about one of them: social media analytics and insight. But these new technologies often feed into old processes and old business structures, allowing much of the dynamism of real-time data to be lost.

That’s why we want to talk to you about agile insight.

Social media researcher Jess Owens will be presenting a a 3o minute webinar on Thursday 13 February (4pm GMT / 11 am EST) – join her to find out more.

It’ll preview her talk at the Insight & Innovation Exchange conference in Amsterdam on 19 February – and offer the chance to ask questions about her experiences managing helping her clients – from mobile, banking and retail – manage crises and consumer backlash in social.

At 9am one morning I got a call from my client at O2: “We’re having a crisis. Total network outage. There’s an executive board meeting in an hour and we need to give them a total overview of the entire situation so that we can plan our response.”

In this webinar we’ll cover 4 topics:

Social media insight for crisis management - what we’ve done for clients from O2 to banks to major retailers, and where the biggest value has been for our clients

Brand threats and longer-term issue management – how can social help?

Partnership with clients to build an agile, actionable research programme – aka is the weekly report always the best way to share research insights? Not necessarily

The true power of the brand tracker dataset - how the unprompted nature of social media mentions allows far adaptive and flexible research, providing the ability to instantly answer questions brands didn’t even know they had

Or if you’ve got any questions in the interim, get in touch with Jessica via LinkedIn or Twitter – she tweets for us @FaceResearch as well as from her personal account, @hautepop

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Jess Owens is a social media researcher in FACE’s London office. As one of the first members of the Global Social Insight team, she has pioneered new research methods with social data, from audience mapping, channel effectiveness studies and studying social media virality and content diffusion. She’s presented several workshops at ESOMAR about social media research methods, and will be speaking at IIEX on 19 February.

You want to meet someone special. Someone that you could start a long, prosperous and mutually beneficial relationship with. Someone whose goals match yours and who you can work with to achieve your goals together. You know what I mean?

No, I’m not thinking about joining an online dating site. I’m thinking about how we work with our clients here at FACE. It’s a partnership, and over time it gets even better. At the start, it can of course be terrifyingly… new.

When you’re in a truly social business, you have to put yourself out there – just like in any other relationship. You have to talk openly. You have to listen. To experience the benefits of a dialogue with your clients or customers– not just a monologue by your brand – you have to be real. My former colleague Pete Blackshaw used to say: you’ve got to demonstrate trust, authenticity, transparency, confidence, consistency, and integrity to be socially successful. Subtext here is that being selfish and isolated is not recommended.

What do you do when you want to find information about a new product, service or organisation? Do you Google the name and check relevant websites, or ask your peers and see what Twitter has to say? How about complaining about a company – phone call to their customer service or quick note to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers? In times when trust in businesses is declining (check out the Edelman Trust Barometer), an increasing number of us are likely to say the latter in both cases. It’s easier, quicker and, lets face it, less frustrating. For that reason it’s important for organisations to be truly present in social media and engage in conversations evolving not only around their brand, but also competitors and the industry in general. Participating in honest and dynamic discussions will help you strengthen existing relationships, but also be crucial in acquiring new brand fans.

This is how they do it

Whether your online presence is established and you’re rocking your customer service on social, or have only just started thinking about jumping on the wagon – one thing is certain, your customers are talking about you (and to you), and they expect you to react. And it’s a good thing!

@O2’s epic response to customer feedback during their network outage in 2012 probably will be used as an example of great customer service for years to come. The company managed to turn what seemed to be a hopeless situation into a successful showcase of its social media ninja skills (forgive us for using this phrase!) and company values.

Not only O2 have benefited from a humorous and witty approach to customer care online. Netflix, Sainsbury’s, and Bodyform have also decided to show their ‘human face’ via social and engaged in a friendly banter with customers.

We acknowledge some companies, financial services in particular, might find this type of approach challenging or even impossible. Fear not! It’s not only about the humour. What matters is having a solid social media strategy, a dedicated team (consisting of one or 20 members, depending on business needs) and technology supporting both.

As Daryl West, Social Media Insight Manager at Telefonica UK, says:

“Social media customer service is now a large part of our service remit with over 4000 customer queries handled by more than 20 trained social media service specialists on a weekly basis. We helped develop an engagement platform with FACE that helped create a strong workflow management system that could filter and categorise queries to drive efficiency in social customer service.”

Telefonica was one of the first companies to realize the potential of social and implement innovative solutions within the business. The brand hasn’t stopped there and being a social business is as important as ever. Says Daryl:

“We truly believe that our presence on social media demonstrates to consumers that we are a forward thinking brand that’s future proofing our customer service by being responsive and supportive on new and developing service channels. Furthermore, we also use social media service as an indicator to flag customer problems, if repetitive issues arise in social we can flag to our other service channels. This is a great way of using real time social media insight to feedback and maintain excellence across all service channels.”

Being real should be easy, not to mention fun, right? So why is the threat of social failure still one of the most frequent concerns I hear from clients?

Well, because just like personal relationships, brand and client relationships take work – and sometimes they can be scary. Inevitably, sometimes needs won’t be perfectly aligned and there will be differences of opinion on the right steps to take. And at FACE we’ve had a breakup where we’ve listened to our client’s point of view but in the end had to be confident about our transparency and remain consistent and true to ourselves. Thankfully, when you’re a truly social business, working on your client and customer relationships also defines you. Each interaction is an opportunity to affirm and communicate what your brand stands for.

FACE CEO Andrew Needham wrote just a couple of days ago about the importance of “delivering customer obsession in the digital age”. Business is changing – moving away from a old manufacturing “product first” model, towards one where customer needs lead. That’s why we think social media listening, engagement and customer care is so important. It’s what turns an interaction into a relationship – it’s what turns brand awareness into customer loyalty.

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Erika Ammerman is the Head of Social Insight at FACE. She has worked for clients ranging from healthcare to hair care and beyond. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Anna Dorywalska is a Social and Pulsar Account Manager. She is following her passion for social media, working with brands including O2, eBay and Samsung. Connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

In the past 12 months I have seen a lot of people in advertising start to talk about the need for brands to open up and start to build relationships:

“We can hypothesize that perhaps the key to brands succeeding in this new world is to mimic a human relationship as closely as possible with consumers”[Edelman's new "brandshare" model]

“As companies become more digital and equipped with advanced marketing analytic tools that allow them to know and predict consumers’ behavior even better than consumers themselves, they need to be more human as well. It’s time to shift the paradigm. Brands need to not only connect directly with their fans but also rethink the concept of brand ownership. Brands can be owned by both the company and the community of customers, fans, and followers that rallies around them.”[John Windsor of Havas & crowdsourcing agency Victor & Spoils, writing in Harvard Business Review]

And Clay Shirky was talking about “humanising brands” as far back as 2008.

What’s this all about? It’s recognising a need for brands to build a dialogue with customers, listening as much as talking – and talking one-to-one as well as broadcasting. It’s about recognising that in the digital landscape, consumers aren’t just “little people” but can be peers and influence leaders – and so brands need to earn the respect of powerful brand evangelists who will shout from a mountain top how wonderful you and your brand really are.

But how do you do this? The journey of humanising brands goes beyond social media tactics and good community management. No – at FACE, we’d argue that brands needs to fundamentally change their behaviour and really put the customer at the heart of what they do.

Nicola Green, Director of communications and reputation at O2, expresses this well:

“I truly believe that brands should treat their social-media conversations like their real-world conversations – it’s all about understanding your audience, engaging with them in a human way and being consistent. Take the time to get to know your social community and build a rapport; you’ll learn what resonates with them and where the lines are in the sand. You’ll also learn what your audience expects from you – which, more often than not, can be swift customer service when something goes wrong.”[Source: Marketing Magazine]

In 2014 I believe we are going to see more forward thinking companies adopt the strategy of humanising their brands in 3 key areas. This will open up big opportunities for the market research industry:

1. Develop a ‘listen first’ culture

Brands will demonstrate an authentic desire to listen and respond to people’s needs in real time by rolling out social listening solutions across customer service, research, marketing, product, operations, and HR. This type of active listening is the foundation of building meaningful relationships.

Brands need an objective market research partner to help develop select vendors and set the key benchmarks and metrics that will underpin the listening programme. They also need help to interpret the huge amounts of qualitative data they will be generating to support stakeholders across the business with faster decision making.

Yes, we said qualitative data. This is the value that market research can offer above the typical technology-led, dashboard-based social listening solutions that lead the market at present. It’s about going beyond volume and sentiment, and focusing on people and their needs.

2. Co-create

In 2014 we’ll see an increasing use of co-creation with customers and external experts. This will be carried out by R&D and marketing/products teams, and to develop both new product innovations and communications. This gives people more personalised experiences that can create a stronger bond between the individual and the brand.

To run strategic co-creation programmes requires world class facilitation and moderation skills to manage interactions between large groups of internal and external partners. Arguably the more important role market research can play here is as the architect of these type of initiatives who ultimately can navigate objectively the politics of companies, and deliver outputs that meet the brief.

3. Agile Communications

All good brands are now publishers, producing content across a huge number of touchpoints. And they’re learning that brand conversations, meanings and needs evolve very quickly. To maximise the opportunity that real time communication offers, companies will be busy building agile CRM & publishing teams who will be responsible for engaging people with relevant information and high quality, timely content that will delight customers.

To support this type of comms team requires continual input from consumers in the creative process to establish what’s relevant, what’s perceived as high quality, and what’s most interesting and shareable. This means that market research can play a role if the research is fast enough. Creative development needs to become more agile – and in 2014 we’ll see this roll out further. New models for content creation are starting to emerge where consumer communities are being consulted in realtime as an extension of the marketing team to ensure that what is being published will hit the mark.

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We’ll no doubt be blogging more about each of these themes in 2014!

Meanwhile, for more about how humanising brands will open up new opportunities for research take a look at these recent articles from across the FACE team:

But this discussion is led by adults, people outside A&F’s target demographic. Maybe their customers think differently? Marketer Nicola Carter argued in the Guardian:

“A&F’s target audience are the cool kids at school, primarily teenagers. If Mean Girls is to be believed, members of this cool clique are thin, attractive, and prepared to protect their position – even if that means picking on the fat kids. It sounds like A&F’s positioning as a cliquey brand that likes to exclude others (especially the bigger boned) will be just great for that group’s filters.”

Really?

Some adults’ opinions certainly do matter to Abercrombie & Fitch: those of investment analysts, the people influencing their share price. That share price is well below 2011 levels, and below the heights reached in 2005-2008. Finance sites report their stock as a sell recommendation, and rising up the ranks of the most-shorted. Analysts’ comments continually talk about Abercrombie ‘losing its cool’ and failing to keep up with trends. So A&F need to do some serious repositioning work to fix that problem.

But worse, the evidence is strong that Abercrombie’s target customers are indeed being put off. Sales fell 13% last quarter. And Abercrombie are having continuing problems with inventory, which strongly suggests they don’t know what customers want, when, in which stores and in what quantities. Consumer tracker surveys back this up: sentiment about the brand is down.

Meanwhile, Florida 18-year-old Benjamin O’Keefe has set up a Change.org petition with 78,000 signatures calling for an end to their size discrimination. And their Facebook profile is a mess:

Our brief

Put Abercrombie & Fitch back in touch with its customers.

Recognise a grain of truth in the offensive things its CEO has said in the past - “Candidly, we go after the cool kids… A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

So Abercrombie seeks to be an aspirational brand. We can work with that.

Thing is, it’s out of touch with what’s aspirational among its core audience.

It also needs to learn about how aspirations have changed. What’s aspirational in a difficult economic climate? Is ‘aspiration’ even as relevant to Millennials, or are other values in the ascendant? And how does Abercrombie evolve its white preppy aspiration model in an America that’s rapidly becoming majority-minority?

So we’ve been talking about “socially intelligent research” a lot recently at FACE – now here’s a chance to outline what this might look like in practice.

1. Participation is continuous with teens’ existing digital lives

Why this is socially intelligent: An immersive research experience gives deeper, more accurate insights. We can also use passive data collection from social media to gain insights at scale to validate – and extend – our thinking.

What this looks like:

Research tasks take place on Pinterest and Tumblr – sites they’re already using. We don’t want essays about what teens find aspirational – we want them to show us visually

Chats and video hang-outs through Skype and Google Hangouts

All already mobile-optimised – completely essential for this age-group

Doing research that fits with teens’ digital lives also means integrating the data created by their social media activity. We’d do this in two ways:

1. Social media brand tracking to capture what tens of thousands of people think about the brand, not just our direct participants. These insights can be fed into the research community as questions or tasks – or resources we invite them to reflect on. This way we triangulate our insights and build much more robust conclusions.

2. Integrate teens’ digital activity into our community as a data resource. With their permission, mine their Facebook activity, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, YouTube and other media use. We get more accurate data – what they actually say & do, not their recollections of their behaviour. And the participants are of course incentivised for this data sharing and get to focus on the more fun and creative tasks.

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2. Teen participants as co-creators, not research subjects

Video has to be central to this research – we’re talking to a generation making YouTube videos, Instagram video, Vine and Snapchat. It’s also a great way to deliver stories and on-the-ground narratives in a digital way – cutting down our research time and costs.

So we’d propose to use video in many of our tasks:

“Auto-ethnography” and narrating their experiences

Interviewing friends

Involve a couple of particularly video-literate participants in editing and producing final videos, aggregating the group’s submissions

Key to an ethnographic model is inviting self-reflection – that is, never disrespect your research participants by assuming they’re not capable of analysing their own behaviour. Teens can be some of the most self-aware people out there in terms of thinking through social & group norms and how they modify their behaviour to fit. Given that we’re talking about what’s aspirational, it’s crucial to bring this social reflexivity in.

We’re doing that with the video ethnography methods – but we’d also involve our participants in the research analysis process and test our insights with them. They are co-creators and the ultimate judges of our brand positioning outputs – if it can’t pass our teen test panel, it’s not yet a solution for Abercrombie.

Why this is socially intelligent: Research needs to work as thoughtfully with the needs & cultures of our clients as we do with our participants. Abercrombie’s a fashion company: 100-slide Powerpoint decks won’t help them change.

What this looks like:

Video outputs strong emotive communication of the overall message. We’re trying to reposition a brand – it’s got to work at gut-level if it’s going to succeed.

Video is also more shareable around the company than a PPT

Moodboards on Pinterest and Tumblr provide a lasting and visual resource, helping designers and stylists keep in touch with their

Final delivery involves face-to-face interactions with our participants – e.g. in-store walkthroughs and workshops. This brings the message home to Abercrombie execs in an immersive and unforgettable way

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So that’s an outline of how we’d help Abercrombie get back in touch with its customers and return to being a brand teens want to wear – and buy – again.

Most of the project’s run digitally, meaning it’s faster, cheaper, and able to cover more of Abercrombie’s customers and markets. It combines the scale of social media research with the deep ethnographic insights of qual – because here at FACE we don’t believe these things are exclusive. And it produces rich visual, video and immersive outputs – no Powerpoint required.

Socially intelligent research, using social data, to turn brands into ‘social businesses’ able to tap into all the ideas, creativity and resources beyond their walls. That’s our vision.

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Liked this thinking? Follow Jess on Twitter (@hautepop), get in touch (Jessica@Facegroup.com) or hear her talk about how Gangnam Style went viral in our webinar next week.

Face CEO Andrew Needham and US Office Head, Philip McNaughton, were at the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in Philadelphia earlier this week. I could not attend, and I was rather disappointed. While I know I have work to do, I still wanted to see Andrew and Philip present on Socially Intelligent Research and catch up on the latest industry buzz.

So I hopped on Pulsar TRAC and started a simple search looking for mentions of the conference and its hashtag (#iiex), similar to how we tracked Le Web two weeks ago. This way I could gather the digital buzz, and that’s the next best thing to being there.

Using Pulsar TRAC I was able to gather all the mentions o the conference. Granted, total volumes were only around 1,500, but that’s not the point. The point is that using Pulsar TRAC’s ability to parse the data, I was able to see what ideas presented got people excited, what articles were shared, and who I should be following on Twitter.

Day 1

People enjoyed the morning’s action-orientated presentations. Charles Trevail’s talk, “Inspiring the Future” was all about how to find breakthroughs in the face of adversity. When Jeffrey Henning summarized it on GreenBookBlog.org, the message continued to travel around the conference the rest of the day.

Trevail was followed by Robert Moran, who kept the energy up with an emphasis on how the industry will look in the future. Apparently we’ll either be futurists, identifying trends, or doing “fast fashion” data analysis, looking at data in real time to facilitate improvements.

Ryan Smith went up next to talk about “Cheaper Faster, Better: How Technology Delivers ROI to Insight Organizations.” His focus on the importance of the researchers who make sense of the data and the continuing development of technology was well-received online.

Following Smith, Jasmeet Sethi from Ericsson spoke about being frugal, both by necessity and choice, in order to help spur innovation. This was perhaps one of the most buzzed about talks, driving mentions at the time and afterword with the sharing of the summary of it on GreenBookBlog.org.

The afternoon’s online chatter continued where Smith left off. Two different speakers, Seth Grimes and Zachary Nippert, had a very similar message: big data is only as good as it is useful, and we need tools that will help us make it useful.

The ideas that resonated were, again, that we need to focus on the people, not the technology. According to Earls, rather than focusing on the new technologies themselves, we should be focusing on how this new technology can enable researchers to identify how people are connected to each other, what goes on between them, and finally how things spread from person to person.

Kearon, in turn, discussed the role of emotion in decision making. He focused on the need to understand emotions and habits in order to understand how we make decisions. This resonated with the audience, probably at least in part because of such lovely quotes as the one below:

Using Pulsar TRAC’s bundle visualization, you can see that “people” – though not the most frequent keyword – ran through most of the other topics discussed online the rest of the day.

Day 3

The first spike at 9 am focused quite a bit on Simon Chadwick’s talk on investment in market research. People retweeted the stats in his presentation, focusing on such things as a 141% increase in VC funding for MR, particularly in big data, mobile, and social media but not in traditional research at all.

But perhaps the biggest driver of mentions on the last day was sharing links. During the entire conference, only 12.6% of mentions included a link, but on the last day, 22.7% of messages included links.

Jeffrey Henning’s, “Always on, always watching,” summary that focused on advancements in passive tracking technology, both online and off, and surveys, showing the survey is anything but dead.

“#IIeX: They Showed You What?!” – also by Jeffrey Henning but this time summarizing a talk on using mobile to access private moments by Sion Agami from P & G and Rick West from Field Agent. In this case the “private moment” was putting in and removing pads from panties!

That’s all well and good, but beyond going to a conference to hear about what’s hot in the industry, I go to them to meet people. How could PulsarTRAC let me do that?

I used Pulsar’s ability to find influencers based on not just volume, but also engagement to reveal who I should be following online. After all, I don’t just want to follow people who are vocal – I want to follow the people other folk turn to.

From this list, the top 5 influencers I should be following out of the Insight Innovation Exchange are:

@melcourtright, Melanie Courtright, VP of Research Services at Research Now, presented “Research Now and Experien: Bridging the Digital Gap” at the conference

@AndrewNeedham, Andrew Needham, CEO of Face… I do believe I know this influencer

But what was it all about?

The conference was an interesting combination of technology and research methods. At first I was worried that we’d get side-tracked by sexy displays of technology, but it remained focused on how we can use technology to assist and augment our research and analysis. But while the first day was marked by excitement, the next two days saw lower online volumes as people got into the routine of going to panels. The panels themselves were very quick, mostly only 20 minutes long, so there was less to Tweet about for each speaker.

I wish I had been there in person – but seeing as I had work to do in New York, this Pulsar TRAC search was the next best thing.